Wishing you a very happy and healthy New Year!

 ROBERT FREEDMAN

and asked if he would like to work on it
with me.”
Freedman and Lutvak had teamed
up for another show, Campaign of
the Century, which was about Upton
Sinclair’s campaign for California gover-
nor in 1934.
“We had a wonderful collabora-
tion, and when we began writing A
Gentleman’s Guide, we were speaking
the same language immediately, Lutvak,
57, says. “As soon as we wrote the very
first song for the musical, ‘I Don’t Know
What I’d Do Without You,’ we knew we
had the right language for this material.
“Robert understands style as I do. My
main teacher in college was very insis-
tent on my learning differences in styles
and how to replicate styles. She was very
genre specific.”
Lutvak, playing piano by ear when he
was 6, wrote an operatic melodrama at
the same age.
“I lived around the corner from a
nephew of Steve Lawrence and Eydie
Gorme,” he recalls. “He was a composer,
and we started writing songs together.
We had written about 360 songs by the
time I graduated from high school.
“I went to college thinking I could
do this for a living. While I was there, I

JOAN MARCUS

r

“Songs are the way into the heads
of the characters.”

John Rapson as Lord
Adalbert D’Ysquith

wrote one show every year. When I came
out of college, I thought I would try to do
this for a living.”
Lutvak, who sold a song while he was
still in school and worked as a cabaret
singer, launched his after-college career
with a production piece about Hannah
Szenes, who was born in Hungary,
went to Palestine, parachuted back into
Hungary to fight against the Nazis and
was executed before her 23rd birthday.
Judaism is important to both mem-
bers of this creative team. Freedman, a
synagogue member, is married to actress
Jean Kauffman, who celebrated her bat
mitzvah at the time their son, Max, cel-
ebrated his over a decade ago.
Lutvak, and his spouse, choreogra-
pher Michael McGowan, plan to raise a
daughter as Jewish.
“Steven and I are very demanding of
each other in a positive way,” Freedman
says. “We spur the other one on to go
further than each might have done if
working alone.
“The best part of it is that we have a
lot of fun. We were always cracking each
other up, but we didn’t know what was
really funny until we put it in front of
audiences, and we like how much fun
audiences are having.”

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by Fay Miller

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September 29 • 2016

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